Nature's Palette

Sometimes I paint without having a clear idea in mind. It may begin with a patch of sky, a trace of sunlight, a few trees, or a landscape I once saw somewhere and somehow kept in memory. I put it down on paper in watercolor, often quite intuitively, without trying to make it look exactly as it did in real life. A small, spontaneous landscape What I like about watercolor is that part of it always escapes control. Water finds its own way across the paper. One color touches another and slowly bleeds into it, sometimes creating transitions I probably could not recreate even if I tried. Perhaps that is why I do not feel the need to make everything precise when I paint landscapes. A tree can be no more than a few overlapping shapes of color. Sometimes a sky only needs to be bright enough for the rest of the scene to quietly fall into place. I tend to pay more attention to light than to detail. Light filtering through leaves, the last bit of warmth before sunset, a shadow beneath a tree, or a faint reflection on water. Small things like these often decide the feeling of the entire painting. I also like leaving certain parts unfinished. Not every leaf needs to be painted. Not every line needs to be explained. Sometimes a single brushstroke, a soft wash, or a piece of untouched paper is enough for the eye to imagine the rest. Maybe that is what I enjoy most about watercolor: it allows things to remain slightly uncertain. A landscape does not always need to tell a grand story. Sometimes it simply holds onto an ordinary moment: a quiet afternoon, trees standing still in the sun, or the feeling of wanting to stay a little longer in front of a view. Most of the time, I paint these scenes because I want to keep that feeling somewhere. Not to reproduce nature exactly as it was, but to remember how I saw it at that particular moment.